For Endless Fables: Dark Moor, we’re very excited to immerse our players in a world inspired by classic Gaelic lore. Each game in the series has brought players face-to-face with characters and creatures from different myths and legends. For our third title, we’re breathing life into the twisted fairy-tale setting of Aberloch, a rural Scottish town.

The team behind Endless Fables is small; there are only five of us! But there are about 30 people total who work at Sunward Games. Each game series has its own small team that is fully dedicated to it. However, there are some people who help out multiple teams, such as the two fantastic VFX guys that make the scenes lively and the cutscenes amazing. We also have one engineer who ‘tunes up’ the game so it runs as smoothly as possible. There are two guys living in the 3D world creating characters and items, and we have an amazing painter who sprinkles the scenes with color. There’s a lady bewitching the Hidden Object scenes, and a veteran graphic designer who does wonders with just a pencil in the story-based Hidden Object scenes. There’s a young and cheerful programmer who assembled the Bonus Chapter in this series, and lastly, there’s a really nice and funny lady who assisted us in creating the game design documents and helps us in any way she can.

You can check the game credits to see who all was involved in the process, but here are the main people who’ve brought Dark Moor to life:

• Máté is our art director. Out of all of us, he’s been with Sunward games the longest. Outside of work, he enjoys canoeing and fishing (especially at the same time).
• Tita is an artist on our team, and she might be a little obsessed with cats. (She even managed to sneak a few into this game!)
• Gergő is our 3D wizard, and is also working on an original comic in his spare time.
• Peti puts everything together using our game engine: Spark CE.
• Anett is the newest member of our team and the producer for Dark Moor, who organized this “Behind the Curtain” piece.

There are some unique challenges and benefits of a team as small as ours. For example, we’ve had some team members leave during this game’s development. Everyone on the team had to pull together to keep the project moving forward while our newest member was learning about the project and their responsibilities. With only five of us working together, we are practically a family. Sometimes, we’ll even celebrate together. In fact, there’s a bottle of champagne chilling in our fridge for Dark Moor‘s release! Our close collaboration makes it so our game has some of each of us shining through within it.

The biggest influence that you may notice in our game is horror. It’s one thing that we all enjoy! Popular shows like Stranger Things and the Hannibal TV series have really inspired us. We’ve worked hard to create a suspenseful, unnerving environment. With every game we make, we’re always pushing ourselves to improve. With Dark Moor, we’ve really focused on creating ominous and beautifully detailed scenes, horrific monsters, and memorable characters.

Our art director works hard to determine the overall look and feel of the game world. He makes sure that the scenes and all of their details fit together, but all of us contribute our own ideas for the game: different interactions, settings, characters, mini-games, and so on. The whole team works together to build up this “core,” which serves as a guide for the person who writes our game design document. Deciding exactly which ideas should go into the game is always one of the hardest parts of development. Not every idea can make it into the game, which can be heartbreaking, but we are all very creative people who are always coming up with new ideas.

We’re very excited to see how players will react to Endless Fables: Dark Moor, which is set to be released April 14th, 2018. We’ve all put a lot of passion into this game, from adding little touches to the artwork to tweaking the animations and making the mini-games more challenging. And, as excited as we are about bringing the latest Endless Fables to you, our gears are already turning for Endless Fables 4!